The competition between Google and DuckDuckGo proved to be surprisingly fierce. In many respects the tiny DuckDuckGo holds its own against the giant that is Google, and even more so if the user is willing to slightly manipulate the search query to work around DuckDuckGo's temperamental intelligence layer. So it is heartening to see that DuckDuckGo is a viable alternative to Google by its own merits. But the elephant in the room here is Google's extensive tracking of user data. For that reason many users will staunchly avoid it on moral grounds, and for them the natural recourse is DuckDuckGo. Fortunately for them, it's a really great choice. In my case, privacy is not a primary concern. But having a top-notch search engine is. That's why I set DuckDuckGo as my browser's default search engine, and here's hoping it stays there for a long time.

I tried the 'new' DDG as well since it came out, setting it as my default search engine. Sadly, my experience wasn't as positive - it simply didn't find the things I was looking for about 80% of the time. Within a few days, I got into the habit of simply adding !g to every search query to go straight to Google anyway since that gave me the results I was looking for.

DDG's interface and presentation are far superior to Google's, but in the end, it's the results that matter, and not the coat of paint they're covered in. I do agree with the author's note about Google always - infuriatingly always - leading with YouTube video results on every damn query. So annoying.

Apparently DDG was useless for searchs in Russian for quite some time, but lately it became more or less on par, mostly because it assigns more weight to Yandex results and ammends them with those from Google. Last time I compared, all three gave comparable results with no clear winner.